Having grown up in Melbourne, this month will be forever linked with the Melbourne Cup and all the festivities that surround it. In recent years, this event has been more controversial, but for me it conjures memories of a mid-weekday off (let’s face it- a long weekend!) hanging with my grandparents, sweeps with chocolate prizes and fun with cousins. It was also my earliest introduction to the concept of “luck”
Luck or good fortune is often presented as a mysterious, supernatural phenomenon, attributed to improbable events to make sense of them. It is deeply nuanced in almost every society that exists. People often have lucky charms, totems or rituals. My brother, who is the last of five children, will always bet on horse number 5 race 5. In the years that he’s been doing this, he’s come out on top. When I was a nervous exam student, I would always listen to the first song played on the radio when I got in the car on my way to the exam. If it was a good song, it meant it would be a good exam.
It was a game that all my friends ended up playing with me and we would spend the trip to university debating the nuances of lyrics, looking for a way to make them positive.
I now like to think of luck as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like a placebo effect, positive thinking can lead to a more positive response to events, improving outcomes. In personality psychology, people can be distinguished by four key aspects, beliefs in luck, rejection of luck, being lucky and being unlucky. Those who believe they are lucky tend to be more positive, happy and successful. Those who believe they are unlucky tend to experience more anxiety and are less likely to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. One study in 2010 found golfers who were told they were playing with a lucky ball performed better than those who were not. I know what I’ll be getting Mark for Christmas this year- a lucky golf ball!
Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public perception of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire did a ten-year study into the
nature of luck that revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. His research demonstrated Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four key principles. They are skilled at:
- Creating and noticing chance opportunities
- Making lucky decisions by listening to their own intuition
- Using positive expectations to create self-fulfilling prophecies
- Adopting a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good
“You become what you focus on”
Psychological research has shown that our attention is finite and limited. This means that where you direct your focus has significant implications for your mental and emotional wellbeing. This is the phenomenon of attention bias. And it is powerful.
At the heart of understanding this is the realisation that your brain grows through experience. Every time you experience something, about 100 billion neurons are waiting and ready to be fired.
The number of neurons that are recruited for a given experience will depend on the type of experience. When neurons are fired, connections are made, and synapses start growing. The more often a pathway is fired, the stronger the connection made and the more reflexive it becomes.
This is as true for a postural pathway as it is for an emotional one.
Experiences matter, but so does the framework you give them. Your brain will build and change whether you like it or not. You have the opportunity to build it in the direction you want to build it. When you can change your framework to a more solution oriented outlook and pair that with a little persistence, (I can still hear my Dad saying “the harder I work, the luckier I get”) you are able to transform failure into feedback and obstacles into opportunities.
If it all seems to be a bit too difficult, just bet on number 5, race 5.
With love,
Jo Sexton
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